Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7): first impressions

I just downloaded IE7 a couple of days ago and I must say: I am impressed! While there is nothing revolutionary about it, Microsoft has done a good job at bringing IE on par with the current standards and array of features expected from modern browsers these days. It took them a long time, but it seems like they are definitely on the right path. And the beta is really stable!

Design 8/10
The first thing you will notice about IE7 is its new interface. The design is much better, much less cluttered with sharp graphics and the way things are laid out it really does give you a lot more viewing area than any browser out there at the moment without having to go full-screen mode. The "Favorites" section is conveniently place right next to the tabs (more on that later) which is the perfect place for it really, however, the display and mechanism of the Favories section have not changed at all. It would have been nice to have a "Quick Favorites Toolbar" of sorts like in Firefox.

The menus have been nicely tucked away on the right-hand side in the form of icons which can be clicked on to bring up a pop menu with all the sub-menus. So if you want to get to Internet Options, just click on the Tools icon on the right-hand side and from the drop-down menu choose the appropriate option.

Speaking of Internet Options, although everything is looking pretty neat and sharp, the way the information and settings are distributed and presented in those many tabs have not changed much at all, which is pretty dissapointing. I, for one, never found IE's menus and settings tabs very organized and sometimes it takes either forever or a quick look up on the web to find how to change a particular setting and this trend apparently continues. At least they seem to have kept things exactly as it was in previous versions so if you've already learned how to enable javascript debugging, for instance, you won't have to learn how to do it again in version 7.

Features 8/10

Tabbed Browsing
Yes, finally, you can use tabbed browsing with Internet Explorer. If you haven't used tabbed browsing before all it means is that you don't need to keep opening new windows all the time when you want to keep something on the screen while checking another web site out. You just open the new one in a tab and you can switch between them to your heart's content. It does make browsing a loooot easier and more enjoyable not to mention practical. Microsoft does not get any patting here though since this is just the way browsing has been now for a looong time so this feature was really no more than the very least expected.

Delete Browsing History
Remember those days when you checked a dodgy web site and thought you had erased all your tracks by hitting "Clear History..." only to find out that when your partner typed any word starting with "p" on google they'd see all the naughty stuff you've looking at on the net?
That's because the "Clear History" is only one part of the equation of making sure no one will be able to see what you've been using your browser for and previous versions of IE didn't exactly make it intuitive to delete all that information. Well, you can be more at ease now with IE7 because everything to do with "browsing history" is on one screen. So all you have to do now is hit "Delete all..." if you are in a hurry or you can just delete whatever information you want individually like cookies or automatic passwords stored by IE.

Built-in Search Bar
Again, another non-ground-breaking feature, but a definitely nice addition. IE 7 has a medium-sized search bar tucked neatly right next to the address bar. The biggest surprise perhaps is that neither it is restricted to MSN searches only, nor MSN is the active search engine by default, it's Google, believe it or not.

Built-in Security
Now, this seems to be the only feature that doesn't clone something that Firefox has already done. IE 7 comes with things such as a built-in Pop-up blocker and anti-phishing filter. The former is more well known, but the later may require some explanation. Phishing is the "art" of "cloning" web sites. For instance, a kid could set up a web site that looks like your bank's site and if they're really good they can make any requests to your bank's site go to his site instead. You wouldn't notice the difference since they'd look the same and bang, the kid's got your log in information effortlessly. IE comes with an anti-phishing engine which supposedly will recognize any dodgy sites and alert you to it in addition to reporting the site to authorities. It does that by keeping a database of dodgy sites at Microsoft and checking to see if you are accessing one of them. So, it begs the question: will this system work? I don't know yet, but Microsoft promises it will, so I guess we'll have to wait and see.


Overall 8/10
So far this is how much it scores for me. Internet Explorer 7 doesn't offer anything new to the browsing scene, instead it just does the big leap from the ancient structure and looks of IE 6 to what is expected of a decent browser in the mid-2000's.